Category: SL User Group Meetings

SL project updates week 50/1: server, viewer, misc

Posted on by Inara Pey

Black Basalt Beach; Inara Pey, August 2013, on FlickrBlack Basalt Beach, August 2013 (Flickr) – blog post

Server Deployments – Week 50

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread in the forums for the most recent news and updates.

On Tuesday, December 9th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the server maintenance package deployed to the three RC channels in week #49. This update comprises:

  • A fix for BUG-7515 “Restarting region turns off ‘block parcel fly over’”
  • A fix for BUG-4949 (non-public) “Cannot manage block list with certain object names”
  • A fix for BUG-7850 “Experience tools: ‘Script trying to teleport other avatars!’ script error” appears incorrectly
  • A fix for BUG-6789 “Spelling mistake in llGodLikeRezObject”
  • Minor server change to help configure the texture and mesh CDN.

On Wednesday, December 10th, all three RC channels should receive a new server maintenance package comprising:

  • A fix for BUG-7595 “Allowed & Blocked experiences persist with parcel owner change after purchase or abandoning”
  • A fix for (non-public) BUG-7036 “Experience based scripts in attached child prims reference their operation by region position instead of root position like non-experience based scripts”
  • A fix for (non-public) BUG-7048 “llGetExperienceDetails() returns 4 for state and “operation not permitted” for state message while over mainland parcels that have the experience allowed”
  • A fix for BUG-6757 “Different error code returned for an Experience that is not permitted to run on a parcel / region OR a user clicked No on the permission request dialog”
  • Additional internal Experience Key fixes
  • To find experiences with all unicode names you have to leave the search field blank and page through all results

SL Viewer

No further updates to any of the SL viewers (release, RC or project) since my last viewer release summary. Please refer to my Current Viewer Releases page for the current status of SL and TPV viewers.

However, as I noted in a separate report, the most recent AMD update to their Catalyst™ drivers, version 14.12 does not resolve the problem of failing to display rigged meshes unless the viewer’s hardware skinning is disabled. I’ve also been informed that this issues also extends to the most recently AMD / Nvidia Omega driver update.

Experience Keys / Tools

the RC deploy due on Wednesday, December 10th, sees a number of fixes and updates for the Experience Keys / Tools project. Again, commenting on the status of the project at the simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, December 9th, Simon Linden said:

 We’re getting close on that … there are some last-minute things to take care of, and we’re being extra careful that we have the systems in place to handle the key-value storage usage.    How much load that will create is some interesting guesswork, but it’s better to be over-prepared.

However, with the holiday season now fast approach, and with it no change windows for server and viewer updates popping-up, it may be that the project doesn’t make it to a deployment beyond its current beta status until the new year.

Once Experience tools are deployed, the Lab will seek to address issues through the Simulator User Group meetings. However, if there is sufficient demand in terms of issues raise for discuss, etc., during the Simulator UG meetings so a to warrant a separate meeting, they will look into doing so.

Group Chat

Commenting on his recent group chat work, Simon had this to say:

There’s another chat server update this week.   It’s pretty minor, but you shouldn’t see the problem where it gets way behind and then starts delivering ancient (more than 5 minutes old) messages.  I’m still chasing the main bug but this should make the recovery faster and less confusing. The new code is on only one of the server cluster machines but will go to more this week, assuming we don’t see new problems.   So far it’s looking good.

He went on to comment that, while a complete overhaul of the group chat system is unlikely, simply because it is unlikely to result in a significant enough improvement in things, despite recent improvements. “the servers still spend more work updating your chat member lists than it does sending messages. That’s just not right.” So it would seem further tweaking of things will continue in 2015.

Tuesday, December 16th will be the last Simulator User Group meeting for 2014.

SL project updates week 49/3: TPV Developer meeting and VMM

Posted on by Inara Pey

The following notes are drawn from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, December 5th, as shown in the video below. Where relevant, timestamps are included in the article to allow for referencing to the video. My thanks as always to North for the recording.

SL Viewer

[00:30] The Benchmark viewer RC, containing the fix for the crash-on-start-up issue (see BUG-7776, BUG-7783), version 3.7.22.297128, was promoted to the de facto release viewer on Friday, December 5th – release notes.

[21:15] One change that has come from the move away from the GPU table to benchmarking is that GPUs that may have been previously blocked (e.g. because they simply aren’t supported) are no longer blocked. This is because the Lab is no longer attempting to spend time on identifying GPUs that don’t work with SL. Instead, best efforts are made on the basis of the data obtained from testing a system’s GPU and applying the Lab’s own heuristics, but if a card doesn’t work with SL, the view being taken is that – it doesn’t work. A suggestion has been made where this is the case to provide some kind of feedback to the user informing them that their GPU cannot support SL.

[01:10] Data from the HTTP Pipelining RC, version 3.7.21.296736, is still being being studied; however, it may not progress to release status. Whether this means further updates may be made or not prior to the viewer progressing further, isn’t clear.

[01:30] The Attachments RC, version 3.7.21.296904, was withdrawn from the release channel on Wednesday, December 3rd, after being merged with the Maintenance release RC, 3.7.22.297131. However, the repository for the viewer which contains just the attachment fixes is being kept open for the time being to allow those TPVDs who wish to cherry-pick the fixes and incorporate them into their viewers.

[02:15] It is anticipated the the Experience Tools project viewer (currently version 3.7.16.293901) and the Viewer-managed Marketplace viewer (currently version 3.7.21.296858) will both be moving to release candidate  status “soon”.

Tool Chain Update

[13:24] The Lab is now “very close” to being able to build on both Mac (e.g. Xcode 6.1. with clang on Yosemite) and Windows (e.g. Visual Studio 2103) with the new Autobuild process “cleanly and with all the right stuff”.

[16:26] Linux is lagging well behind Windows and Mac in terms of the new tool chain, and the Lab welcomes any help TPV developers are willing to provide to help get it updated. In the meantime, it looks likely that the Windows and Mac versions of the viewer built using the new tools and process will start to be deployed once everything is ready, rather than being held-up while the Linux version of the viewer is brought up to speed.

CDN Update

[02:45] The Lab is continuing to “play with” how the CDN is working, making tweaks and changes, some of which have helped Highwinds make improvements to the service, and monitoring of the service is continuing. Thanks is again expressed to all those users who have helped the Lab pin-down issues.

Viewer-managed Marketplace

If you're a merchant or creator using the SL Marketplace, and haven't already done so, you might want to check-out the Viewer-managed Marketplace beta
If you’re a merchant or creator using the SL Marketplace, and haven’t already done so, you might want to check-out the Viewer-managed Marketplace beta

[03:20] Testing of the new Viewer-managed Marketplace (VMM) functionality is continuing on Aditi.

Various issues have been logged against the project, and the Lab has been addressing them. The testing facilities on Aditi will remain available through the holiday season to January – although, as noted above, the viewer may move from project to RC status in that time.

Beta testing is still very open to anyone with an interest in trying VMM out for themselves – particularly content creators and merchants who use the SL Marketplace, obviously. If you haven’t already availed yourself of the opportunity, the Lab encourages you to do so over the holiday period. Note that you must have the VMM project viewer and be on the VMM regions on Aditi in order to do so – see my VMM beta test and viewer overview.

In-world Meeting

Also, merchants and content creators should note that the Commerce Team is liable to hold a meeting to discuss VMM in the near future. This will mostly likely be held on Aditi, and Brooke Linden is organising it. So please watch for notice of the meeting via the forums, blogs, etc.

Avatar Z-offset Height Adjustment

[11:11] No major news here, other than “work is continuing”.

Other Items

Wiki Editing

[14:27] In October, the SL Wiki was made read-only (editable by LL staff only) while it underwent maintenance, and has remained that way since. However, updates are now being tested, and it is hoped that the wiki will be unlocked to allow users to edit (where applicable) soon.

Viewer Stats and GPU Frame Rates

[17:24] Some stats on viewers are being to be produced for TPVs once more, related to operating systems, and some have been produced (for the SL viewer) by GPU. This led to a request for the Lab to update an old Frame Rates by GPU table (bear in mind the table shown is very old, and doesn’t take into consideration a lot of more recent updates to SL which affect frame rates). This also came up at a recent Open-source development meeting, and Oz has passed a request onwards within the Lab to see if an updated for of the table could be produced.

Firestorm Release

The next Firestorm release is scheduled for 18:00 SLT on Wednesday, December 10th, 2014. This release will, among other things, include the group ban capability. I’ll have my usual review available when the viewer is issued.

SL project updates: week 49/2: viewer, group chat

Posted on by Inara Pey

Let it snow! Isles of Lyonesse; Inara Pey, December 2014, on FlickrLet it Snow! Isles of Lyonesse (Flickr) – blog post

Note: most of the following notes are taken from the Server Beta User Group meeting held on Thursday, December 4th, 2014.

Server Deploys for Week 49 – Recap

  • There was no deployment to the Main channel, following-on from the lack of any deployments to the RCs in week #48.
  • On Wednesday, December 3rd, all three RC channels received the same server maintenance package, comprising the following updates:
    • A fix for BUG-7515 “Restarting region turns off ‘block parcel fly over’”
    • A fix for BUG-4949 (non-public) “Cannot manage block list with certain object names”
    • A fix for BUG-7850 “Experience tools: ‘Script trying to teleport other avatars!’ script error” appears incorrectly
    • A fix for BUG-6789 “Spelling mistake in llGodLikeRezObject”
    • Minor server change to help configure the texture and mesh CDN.

SL Viewer

On Tuesday, December 2nd, the Lab released a new Benchmark release candidate viewer, version 3.7.22.297128, which should address the VFS crash-on-start-up issue some users were experiencing following the promotion of the original Benchmark viewer as the de facto release viewer on November 10th (see BUG-7776, BUG-7783). If you are still experiencing issues with the SL viewer on start-up, please give this RC viewer a try, and report your experiences via BUG-7783.

The Maintenance RC viewer was updated on Wednesday, December 3rd to version 3.7.22.297131. This viewer includes a range of updates and fixes for voice, privacy, rendering, texture animation, avatar distortion, inventory management, sounds, mouselook in Mac, multiple UI fixes in script editor, pay flow, chat, stats floater, edit menu, etc.

The attachment fix RC viewer (version 3.7.21.296904) has been withdrawn from the release channel, possibly pending further fixes to be incorporated into it.

Group Chat

Simon Linden has carried out further work on group chat, so that if a server ever gets to the point where there is a bad message backup, instead of sending potentially “sale” messages, the server will drop those messages that are 5 minutes or more old which are sitting in the queue.

The focus on this change is to eliminate issues where – as recently has been the case – back-end issues (rather than simply the weight of messages being handled by the chat servers), mean that messages stop getting sent out and start building up in a held queue; then when the back-end issue is fixed, users suddenly receive a flood of old and outdated messages that they likely have no interest in, due to the length of time that has passed while the chant server is “down”.

Simon has also been working on the logic the chat server use to send messages to people, which should mean that as long as the chat service knows where you are, messages should now reach you somewhat faster.

However, the logic behind what happens should you move between regions while engaged in a group chat still means that the group chat server to which you are connected will send message to the last region it knew you to be on; if you’ve moved on, then the simulator will inform the chat server of this, and the chat server will then perform a look-up to find out where you are. Even so, and while it may have been placebo, during a test at the end of the Server Meeting, it did seem there was less delay in receiving messages when moving between multiple regions & closing and re-opening group chat windows.

Experience Keys / Tools

Server-side updates are anticipated as being in the RC channel deployment for week 50 (week commencing Monday, December 8th). As noted in part 1 of this week’s report, there is a hope the the project may be released by the end of the year – although the project viewer is still awaiting update to RC status (and parity with more recent viewer updates), and there apparently is further QA work to be completed. Speaking about the project during the Server Beta meeting, simon again re-stated the overall intent with the initial release, when it does occur:

We know this first release isn’t perfect and doesn’t have the full feature set we’d love to build, but it’s a start.  Hopefully we’ll see some usages and those will show it’s promising for more attention and features.

SL project updates week 49/1: server, viewer, issues

Posted on by Inara Pey

Pinoy Hideout, Lions Hill; Inara Pey, May 2014, on FlickrPinoy Hideout, Lions Hill (Flickr) – blog post

Server Deploys for Week 49

  • There has been no deployment to the Main channel, following-on from the lack of any deployments to the RCs in week #48.
  • On Wednesday, December 3rd, all three RC channels should receive the same server maintenance package, comprising the following updates:
    • A fix for BUG-7515 “Restarting region turns off ‘block parcel fly over’”
    • A fix for BUG-4949 (non-public) “Cannot manage block list with certain object names”
    • A fix for BUG-7850 “Experience tools: ‘Script trying to teleport other avatars!’ script error” appears incorrectly
    • A fix for BUG-6789 “Spelling mistake in llGodLikeRezObject”
    • Minor server change to help configure the texture and mesh CDN.

A question was asked at the simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday December 2nd, whether the fix for BUG-4949 would also address SVC-7550, relating to previously blocked avatars reverting to being blocked after someone has cleared them from their block list. Simon indicated that while BUG-4949 would not fix this issue, it is being addressed, but requires further back-end work.

SL Viewer

On Monday, December 1st, the de facto release viewer was updated to version 3.7.20.296724, formerly the Snowstorm RC viewer, which includes update for Japanese input; improved rendering of projectors; fixes for object editing bug when rotating and for crash on exit on OS X Yosemite in full screen mode, and more – release notes.

This viewer edged-out the current Maintenance RC viewer (version 3.7.21.296734) in terms of promotion. However, the latter has had a growing list of  issues, most of which are related to fitted mesh, and which may be addressed by the attachments update viewer (RC version 3.7.21.296904).

Experience Keys / Tools

There have been a lot of requests and ideas around expanding / improving the upcoming Experience Keys / Tools (for example: BUG-6912). Commenting on the general status of the project, Simon Linden indicated he’s doing some work related to attachments – although he wasn’t able to go into specifics. However, commenting on the ideas put forward a JIRAs submitted in general, he said:

To put things in perspective, this release is the first one for this feature.   I’d really like to see it succeed and have us move on to an update that adds more features like these. And while they aren’t going into this first release, the JIRA’s aren’t being ignored … we’ve gathered them and had to pick an choose what we could release with and without.

Oz also added, in response to, and alongside of, Simon’s comments:

Exactly. There will doubtless be many ways to improve and expand the experience concept. We want to get more applications built with it and see which are the best ways to invest in it further.

Other Items

3D Connexions Support

3D Connexion is the brand name for the space Navigator range by Logitech. As has been reported through this and other blogs, and also on the forums. More recent versions of the 3D Connexions drivers have been causing some problems on installation. The API support for these devices within the viewer is also quite old (although Linux has been recently updated), and Cinder Roxley is working to try to improve things in this area. However, updating to the newer API support may force things to be platform-dependent, and so take longer to implement, but it might result in the support of more 3D connexions devices.

Hair Base Cloud Issue

Some users are encountering issues of seeming themselves rendered as a cloud in their own world view. This may be connected to them where a hair base with a missing texture (essentially a bad asset), which causes the server to reject the hair base when worn. The result leaves the avatar as a cloud in the user’s own view, although to everyone else they appear to be rendered correctly. An error message is actually generated on the matter:

newview/llvoavatarself.cpp(2273) : 2014-12-01T15:32:45Z INFO: LLVOAvatarSelf::getIsCloud: Self is clouded because of no hair texture

However, this only goes to the viewer log, and is not made visible through the UI. As the viewer thinks you’re wearing the hair base, the problem is not obvious to many users. So, should you find this happening, try replacing it with a different hair base.

Current Outfit Folder Issues

When Server-side Appearance (SSA) was being deployed in 2013, some users on certain TPVs encountered issued with duplicate current outfit folders being generated – see SUN-99. A fix was made to prevent this from happening, however, there have been a couple of recent reports that it is occurring one again (see BUG-7880 and BUG-7920 – interestingly, the latter case appears to have had all system folders duplicated). The cause of these problems isn’t currently known, but requests to support for tun the SUN-99 inventory fix does appear to resolve problems, once the user has cleared cache locally and re-logged.

Teleport Queueing

A feature request (BUG-7945) for a teleport queueing feature to be implemented to ease access into very busy regions. As noted during the Simulator User Group meeting, such an automated queuing system as proposed might be labour-intensive to implement and also be open to exploitation. However, commenting on the idea of improving how teleport queues and notifications might be better handled, Simon Linden said:

I was talking with someone about the incoming TP queue yesterday. It seems like it needs some attention. I don’t think we’d build a queue and later TP anyone, but it’s doing too much work before it decides you can’t get in.

 Whether this will result in some clean-up to the current process of handling teleports into busy regions remains to be seen.

SL project updates week 48/1: server, viewer, Experience Keys, Cocoa bugs

Posted on by Inara Pey

It All Starts with a Smile, March 2014It All Starts with a Smile, March 2014 (Flickr) – Blog post

Server Deployments – Week 48

On Tuesday, November 25th, the Main channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to the release candidate channels in week 46. The update comprises “minor improvements” to help configure the texture and mesh CDN, by allowing the Lab to reconfigure the CDN URL if they need to, with the intention of the of making it a more dynamic host name in the future.

There are no deployments to the release candidate channels this week, due to the Thanksgiving no change window opening, which runs from Wednesday, November 26th through until start of business on Monday December 1st.

Server Beta Meeting – Thursday, November 27th

Just a reminder, there is no Server Beta group meeting this week, due to Thanksgiving in the USA. Happy Thanksgiving, all of you in the States!

Viewer Updates

The Attachment RC viewer was updated on Tuesday, November 25th to version 3.7.21.296904. This release adds fixes for two additional problems compared to the November 12th release of the RC:

  • MAINT-4537 “Change in Maintenance Viewer breaks my joint rigged mesh avatar”
  • MAINT-4687  “Petite” avatars render deformed for the wearer but not for observer.

Saving and Loading Graphics Settings

The option to save certain graphics settings in the viewer (STORM-2082) is moving forward; there is currently an initial test viewer undergoing trials, but things are in a state of flux.

The idea behind this change is to provide a means by which users can quickly switch between two sets of graphics pre-sets they have created and saved locally, allowing them to quickly adjust the graphics setting to assist with performance as they move around the grid (so a user would have a set of “low” graphic settings they could switch-on in order to maintain performance in busy regions, and a set of “high” graphics settings, with as many bells and whistles turned on as they like, for use in quieter regions).

As noted in my week 46 report, the initial work saw a “Quick Preferences” floater added to the viewer, which allows users to set various settings and would likely include options to save said settings.

Initially, this was accessed via the Setup tab in the official viewer’s Preferences, but a suggestion has been made to keep everything accessible under the Graphics tab to prevent unnecessary fragmentation of options. A suggestion has also been made to change the name of the floater, as “Quick Preferences” is a term used by several TPVs, where it has a different context.

Experience Keys / Tools

Progress continues with the Experience Keys (Tools) project. The project viewer hasn’t been updated in a while, but work has apparently been going on elsewhere  – including a decision on what the charge will be for an Experience Key, although this has yet to be made public.

As a quick recap on this, and from my original overview on Experience Keys / Tools:

Every experience using the Experience Tools capabilities must be governed by an Experience Key supplied by the Lab – think of it as a licence applied to the experience and to all control scripts used within that experience, and which directly links the experience / experience scripts directly back to the experience owner, providing an audit trail of accountability.

Thus, the Experience Key allows the Lab to instantly revoke all permissions used by a given experience, stopping al the scripts associated with it, in necessary. This is intended to reduce the risk of people using Experiences as a means of griefing. As a further deterrent, the Lab will be charging some form of fee for the “licensing” of an Experience Key.

The cornfield, revamped in July, still provides a taster for SL Experiences - access it via the Portal Park
The cornfield, revamped in July, still provides a taster for SL Experiences – access it via the Portal Park

Apparently, Experience Keys / Tools were supposed to be released this quarter. However, with the Christmas season fast approaching, it seems questionable as to whether this will be achieved. As Oz Linden said in the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, November 25th, “wish me luck”!

As previously noted, the initial release of Experience Keys / Tools will not support grid-wide experiences – although this is still on the Lab’s list for future enhancements to the platform.

Other Items

Cocoa Bugs

Many Mac users are still experiencing Cocoa-related issues, finding them something of a bone of contention as the Lab doesn’t regard some of the issues being experienced (such as excessive typing lag) as specific to the viewer, but rather endemic to the OS X operating system. All told, here is quite a wide range of issues, and TPV developer Cinder Roxley is attempting to resolve a number of them.

Part of the problem lies in the way the cursor position on the screen is translated to the cursor position in-world, which is in turn very screen resolution specific. This makes bug testing / fixing particularly hard: as fixes need to be tested against multiple monitor types. Cinder has been in touch with Apple engineers and has found one of their suggested solutions –  removal of deprecated calls – hasn’t helped in resolving problems, so fixes may yet be a while off.

SL project updates week 47/2: TPV Developer meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

The following notes are drawn from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, November 21st, as shown in the video below, and from the Server Beta Meeting held on Thursday November 20th. Where relevant, timestamps are included in the article to allow for referencing to the video. My thanks as always to North for the recording.

SL Viewer

[01:10] RC and project viewers are starting to stack-up once more, and further viewers are on their way. The release channel currently has four RC viewers in it: HTTP Pipeline 3.7.21.296736; Snowstorm 3.7.21.296724; Maintenance 3.7.21.296734, and Attachments 3.7.21.296729.

HTTP Pipeline RC and Texture and Mesh Fetching

The HTTP Pipeline viewer appears to be performing better with the CDN than the current pipeline code for those encountering problems. However, further updates to the RC are likely before it reaches a release status.

[05:23] In general, texture and mesh fetching via the CDN continues to work well for most people, although the Lab are still investigating why it is not working so well for some. The hope is that further improvements will be forthcoming, but at the moment the work is still very much in progress.

Attachments RC Viewer

[07:55] Vir Linden has some further updates for the Attachments RC, which should help improve the predictability of getting the right appearance as you’re going through outfit changes. This work has been tested in a closed test viewer and the results are such that Vir hopes to pull them into the RC version of the viewer as soon as possible.

Benchmark Viewer RC

[02:33] A new Benchmark viewer (removal of the GPU table) should hopefully be released on Monday, November 24th (or shortly thereafter). This includes:

  • Further improvements to how the viewer initials sets graphics preferences for some GPU types
  • Address the crash-on-start-up issue which some users are encountering in the current release viewer (3.7.20.296094), and which appears to be related to the benchmark update.

Those wishing to try a pre-RC release can do so by downloading from here.

Viewer Build Tools

[30:19] The Lab is making progress with compiling the viewer using the new build tool chains. The performance issues that resulted when building the Mac viewer (again, see my week 43 report), appear to have been resolved.

The work to build the windows version of the viewer using Visual Studio (VS) 2013 is going “really well”, with the Lab having almost all the packages ready to go – so much so that Oz believes that the Lab will have a version of the viewer built using VS2013 in week 48 (week commencing Monday, November 24th) – although this doesn’t necessarily mean said viewer will be publicly available.

As Microsoft have just issued Visual Studio Community 2013, which allows developers to create applications for free, so long as they are not intended for commercial gain (and TPVs aren’t built to be sold), it is hoped at TPV developers will in future be able to builder their viewers with exactly the same software as the Lab.

In addition, the Lab is working on an internal wiki page for building with VS2103, which will likely go public when finished to sit alongside the existing wiki page on the new autobuild process.

Viewer-managed Marketplace

The Viewer-managed Marketplace (VMM) project viewer, version 3.7.21.296858, was released on Friday, November 21st, together with information on the open beta testing for VMM on Aditi. I have provided coverage of this via a separate article in this blog, see:Viewer-managed Marketplace: beta testing and a look at the project viewer.

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